A newly-formed task force of staff, faculty and administrators will handle the university’s response to last year’s Great Colleges to Work For survey results, the University of Wyoming administration announced at Thursday’s town hall meeting in the Union.
Administrators and faculty also presented updates regarding campus planning, housing and legislation affecting UW’s long-term future.
UW President Laurie Nichols said the task force, called the Strategic Improvement Working Group, will prioritize problems named by multiple survey respondents and voiced during December’s town hall meeting, when the results were first disclosed to faculty and an initial plan formed.
“They will come up with a variety of topics that they’ll first attack to start working on this,” Nichols said. “These will be things that were really loud and clear in the results.”
Michael Barker, professor of architecture and civil engineering and previous Faculty Senate chair, will serve as chair of the group.
“After the survey, after the recommendations, this is our chance to make improvements,” Barker said. “If we miss this it’s going to be years before we can do something this coordinated, this involved like we have done this past year. We have some real structural problems at UW, we have some perception concerns, we have morale and appreciation issues. And certainly we have communication obstacles to overcome.”
The task force’s goal will be to implement a broad array of improvements to address grievances and suggestions voiced by campus employees in the Great Colleges survey by forming smaller groups of hand-picked individuals with expertise in specific areas. The group will also aim to maintain clear, effective communication with the rest of campus throughout the process.
“We know this is going to be a lot of work,” Barker said. “I believe this effort is very worthwhile. We can make some very positive changes at UW, start improving the working situation here, and get back to the ‘great colleges’ feeling that we’ve had in the past.”
Current Faculty Senate chair and professor of veterinary sciences Donal O’Toole said Barker is a good pick for a vital job and agreed that the issue is a time-sensitive one.
“He has the ear of the president and a good feel for how UW works as well as what are doable fixes,” O’Toole told the Branding Iron. “It is important the committee identifies the big sore spots affecting morale, and that recommendations coming from the committee are taken seriously.”
The town hall meeting also addressed campus master planning. Neil Theobald, vice president of UW Finance and Administration, overviewed the year-long effort currently in progress to compose a master plan for the UW campus itself.
When the analysis is complete next year, Theobald said, it will provide “a 20-year agenda with priorities as to how we’re going to spend the funding that we have available to ourselves for buildings, classrooms, labs, landscaping, all of that sort of thing.”
Seven task forces will then focus on areas such as the look and feel of campus, its learning environments, athletics, student life and the overall connectedness and mobility of getting around campus, including accessibility for people will limited mobility.
The University hired Sasaki Associates, a national planning firm that completed master plans for the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Texas at Austin, to create the master plan and begin forming a vision of how to make UW stand out and better represent its residents.
“Every university believes it’s unique, but I believe this university can make a very strong argument that we really are unique,” Theobald said. “As we plan all this for the next twenty years, what is this state about? Where are these people coming from?”
Vice President for Student Affairs Sean Blackburn presented updates on another key concern about campus development: new residence halls. A bill to greenlight plans for new student housing and dining accommodations cleared both houses of Wyoming’s legislature and now awaits Governor Mark Gordon’s approval, Blackburn said.
“This bill truly gives UW flexibility and additional finance options as we move the future of housing forward,” Blackburn said. “We are very excited, very bullish about the future of student housing at the University of Wyoming.”
The UW administration and the Board of Trustees will collaborate to determine next steps for the plan and to choose the sites of new residence halls by 2020, Blackburn said.
